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124577-morning-coffee-49-the-completionist-edition
Content ---- ---- ---- ---- The group PvE one is for all the dungeons, adventures, group content things. I always pick up the PvE quest one, cause that one I can do on my own with dailies or any level 50 quest. No group needed. Hope you all have a great day! | |} ---- Yeah, I'm not a fan of the 'squirg' area but Prosperity Junction is cool. Maybe because I know it's the last area out there :) | |} ---- The quest objective said something about going to special ops and reviewing a simulation or somesuch. Can't remember, and I'm at work right now so can't check. But it definitely didn't just say "do dungeons" or whathaveyou. xD Unless I picked up another one by mistake. Possibly. I got dragged into rifting by the SO before I could go check it out yesterday haha. | |} ---- If I could make ONE REQUEST of WildStar, it would be that, right there. As a rabid Alt-O-Holic, I have to admit, as awesome as the world of Nexus is, after two years the Algoroc>Galeras>Whitevale>Farside>Wilderun>Margrave grind has gotten extremely stale. The worst part in my mind is that even if I go Dominion, I'll STILL have to do Whitevale>Farside>Wilderun>Margrave from the other direction, just because there is nowhere else to go. :( | |} ---- I'm not completely sure how that one goes. I have never done it, personally, but have heard others complain about getting groups together to get it done. I will have to do it to see what it's really all about. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Well, the second one was (the one where they didn't tell me up front). Nothing sketchy about a friend asking for help and telling me I probably won't get a token and me saying "OK". Yep, and this is why I was OK with it in the end. Because I was there to help and be supportive, part of the way of doing that was by not raging about loot. In the end, it's the same part of my nature that likes pugging and helping out new players. If my contribution is to help a guild get a kill and help them get through the morale drain of being short for a night (man, I've been there), then I'm happy to do it. As long as it's my choice :) In my circle, when we've been short we've often just 19 or 18 manned everything and called the evening over early if we hit a wall. It turns out, in GA we've found you don't always need the full 20, so better to just to push through and not try to deal with merging an outsider into the loot system. If we do bring in an outsider, it's generally from a trusted source and they have full roll chances on any main spec loot. But 19 manning Kuralak for our second kill was definitely a morale booster :D | |} ---- That sounds like the Omnichore-1 solo-only mission. Well they almost got the token system right. In TOR the tokens that drop are weight agnostic and specific bosses will drop specific slot tokens. But no, can't suggest either of those because that would be dumbing down the #hardcore again. I'm very much a completionist and had a tendency to re-watch most of the cutscenes in TOR. I think I was up to 15 max level characters there. After that many characters there were places (Voss, bleh. Corellia because I was sick of levelling by that time) I'd only do the class stories as they were unavoidable. IMO Wildstar's levelling storytelling is awful due in no small part to the twitterfied mission giver interaction. It is wholly unengaging. Except for a few bright spots here and there very few missions are all that memorable. I've done the Whitevale -> Grimvault chain in full once. I started skipping a bunch on my 2nd (Kitty) but I did my path missions and on my 3rd (Elsa) I focused on a more optimal run pretty much ignoring path if it was out of the way. Heh, speaking of path, about the only one I can tolerate is Scientist. So, yeah that's a lot of repeating too. The bright side of doing those at 50 (I wanted the Ph.D title) is that it's far easier. Ecto sword for you and one for you and one for you aaaaand have a bird. Usually only needed the first sword and a spectral swarm. | |} ---- Same. I have 4 characters now at 50. My main, the first, did pretty much everything, almost every single quest and path mission. #2 went through it a little less carefully and faster, skipping things here and there. 3 and 4 now just do the minimum and go to the next zones ASAP. If a quest isn't 2, 3 levels above me, or one of the very good ones, I'll skip it. I'd guess my 3rd and 4th character have done the same quests about 70, 80% of the time, with the other 20-30% being quest one skipped and the other one completed. Path missions get done if they are convenient, but maxing my path is left until I'm 50. Since path missions give you appropriate XP for your path level, you can run back to the starter zones and do easy missions there for a lot of XP. | |} ---- Wow! I didn't know this! Thanks! | |} ---- Thought I'd engage here just because I think that's kind of banging on an obvious drum and the problem is more nuanced. Let's face it, we're running around in an elaborate Skinner box. It's simply the truth. Now, we have made this very elaborate and and in this elaboration lies a lot of fun in doing ensemble work with people and accomplishing the goal, so we're transcending the "push a button, get a pellet" a bit -- but still at its core, it's a Skinner box. Regardless of whether one plays for the fight (like Jeff was relating) or for the loots, we want/need the loots for enabling pushing the next button (winning the next fight). It's a simple fact that random reward tickles the brain more than a guaranteed reward. It does. See the entire existence of Las Vegas (and no small body of research work). So it's not hardcore to have random loot, it's just the nature of the game at its very core. Now being the hopefully rational creatures we are more often than not, we can take a look at this and say "Aha, well I know I'm being played, but I kind of like it, and it's worth my time." However over extended periods this equation is going to start to change as the mind acquires data on the randomness. And even if it's 100% uniform distribution, the human brain doesn't really handle probability well. The less something is seen to drop, the more the belief takes hold that it's not going to drop. At the same time, this drop facilitates improvement on the next button so... it's sort of a double whammy. So... random is good for satisfaction (Skinner random tickle), but true random may skew and produce more dissatisfaction over time (human brain sucking at probability). What should a designer do? The second can be relieved by providing a steady progression path (as I've seen advocated, and I think is not a bad idea) but I suspect it reduces the Skinner satisfaction to some (maybe small?) degree. Moving to tokens that affect armor sets I think was an excellent move. It sort of scratches the Skinner satisfaction a bit (might be the armor class I need!) but spreads out the number of people it can affect, so less skew in dissatisfaction. However, skew still results. Might going an additional step make it unskew completely? Logically it seems like just having a slot token that would apply to any armor class might be a good move. I'm not entirely sure, actually I think would end up worse overall and it gets back to the brain's coping mechanism with probability. We can rationally look at the raid composition and say "Hey, you know, we've only got 2 engies and 3 warriors. I've got a great shot at getting gear" Brain gets happy! Braint hinks these are great odds. Skinner box satisfied. Brain is also not dealing well with the fact that it requires 1) encounter success 2) quantity of token drops and 3) token drops in the right armor category. The brain is pretty good at dismissing things that appear not to affect it. "Oh, light armor dropped. Well that doesn't affect my estimation of how good the probability was, as I had no chance there anyway! I'm still rolling against 4 other people when it DOES happen." Thus... less dissatisfaction in the moment. (Brains are also notorious about living in the moment and having trouble projecting futures -- see probability). Now, make a token that applies to everyone. Holy crap, Brain realizes he or she is competing against NINETEEN OTHER PEOPLE. Those aren't good odds at all! Wow, Brain thinks, is this really worth the bother? I don't think this is an unreasonable observation to make about people's behaviors in MMOs. Now, how to combat this? We'd like to facilitate a VISIBLY even distribution of loot (not necessarily mathematically uniform) while keeping the Skinner tickle going while continuing to fool the brain's fuzzy understanding of probability and projection. The current method isn't bad, so maybe just adding a means by which apparant uneven loot can be adjusted by hand. That's why I was thinking of a method to transform a piece of gear among the two categories. Need to have at least a modicum of intelligence about it, benefits standing core raids the most (a pure PUG raid won't care so much as the sample size is that raid only, not extended months of progression raid). Linking it to a guild seems useful, and then needs to not be a trivial decision (price?). Some of those details are admittedly fuzzy. I don't think most solid guilds have any lack of influence currency, which makes the price problematic. Also, that "modicum of intelligence" is not a guarantee either and this facilitates raid leads with unethical behavior to game it to some benefit. I don't know what the answer is. It'd be nice to be able to take a token for heavy armor that's going to offspec to be able to be repurposed to people who need mainspec gear, make that a nontrivial operation, but one that a dedicated raid group could undertake for its own benefit. Still, all of that is not hardcore, nor related to hardcore. PS: Apologies for the wall of observation and analysis. I actually am an engineer; my brain works like this. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- I thought I picked up the group PvE weekly though. D: | |} ---- Nothing off the venture board sends you to Secret Ops (Exile) or the Enigma Chamber (Dominion). I'm pretty sure the only simulation you get down there is related to the OC-1 weekly which comes via a datachron call. | |} ---- If you allow re-purposing, even with a cost, would that really be different enough from just handing out tokens? And at that point, even splitting tokens either by a fixed slot, but of any armor class, or a fixed armor class, but for any slot, might just as well be re-purposed as well, so just make a token completely generic, "GA class armor token". Guarantees no drop goes to waste and allows you to gear up your new main tank faster, but now you always have high competition for all drops. While this eliminates the individual Skinner tickle, it would also remove so much salt and drama from the game (you know, where nothing for heavies drops for 3 weeks, then a piece comes up and you have your 5 warriors at each others and the loot council's throat, words are spoken, raid lead's parentage questioned, and 2 people quit the guild). If you stick with some limits on the tokens, but allow for changing it, making the re-purpose cost guild-wide, like 1 million influence, would also spread the "tickle" for a good drop over the whole guild: "man, I'm glad we don't have to grind dungeons for a week to pay for the token re-roll" instead of giving one person that nice feeling: "yeay, my light armor legs!!". Maybe tie the re-purposing cost to an individual challenge would be better, like the imbuement for eldan glove's with Kuralak's no-hitter step, with an alternative but grindy path, like pay 50k renown, in case you just can't pass the challenge. Or allow an unfavorable trade system, where two, three unused drop tokens can be traded in for a generic token. An unused token drop could then be kept by the GM or raid lead and once enough such drops have been collected, you can trade them in for a generic token that buys a piece for any slot of any armor class. | |} ---- ---- I r an eng-i-neer too ;) When I use "#hardcore" it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek and meant to poke people who scream bloody murder whenever any sort of QoL features are suggested to deal with irritants that often contribute to player burnout. Ask yourself this: How many of your clothies are ready to hang it up? Back when loot was this hot mess of meta-RNG the #hardcore crowd swore up, down and sideways that tokens meant the End Times Were Nigh and that Wildstar raiding would be transformed into Hello Kitty Adventures. *checks* Nope, the game is still pretty brutal. Guess they didn't quite nail that prediction. But to get closer to your point, tokens weren't the only drops from TOR's raid bosses only that they were guaranteed. There was still an RNG loot table that could drop random pieces of gear. The gear that dropped had better optimized stats than you could buy with their end-game currency. Lottery fueled endorphins achieved. The problem with adding in a conversion cost is that often it will be pushed to the recipient. For instance, fluxes are way too flipin' expensive. If the cost depends on guild currency (influence) then that punishes any non-guild people you use to fill the raid team. At the end of the day it is up to Carbine to figure out how they want to address the harm (if any) caused by weight locked tokens. Figuring out where that "just right" point is between Stingy and Too Generous is hard. | |} ---- ----